Saturday, September 13, 2008

Bike Class

My bike club decided, at the last club meeting, that it would be good for the club to send interested people to take the "safety class" offered by the League of American Bicyclists, just for general knowledge. Any safety tips would be valuable, especially for ride leaders, or people that help marshall other rides, etc.

So I signed up. The first part of the class was OK, mostly topics like general bike safety, and entirely lecture based. Due to a schedule conflict, I wound up taking the second part today, and it was much more fun.

Today's the class started out with lecture and slides, but the topics were more interesting, since they were directly about road position: where to position a lone cyclist or group of cyclists, in various traffic situations. The general idea is to think of ourselves as a slow moving vehicle - we obey all traffic signs, take the rightmost lane that serves our destination, etc. The slides covered more complicated scenarios that before, such as handling a fork in the lane.

But what made today's class most fun was practicing maneuvers in the parking lot: quick turning, emergency stopping, swerving to miss small objects, etc. After that we went on a ~15 mile loop to practice everything. We even had a quiz over the material.

I passed both the quiz and the bike portion, so I'll get my certificate along with the others in the club... whenever that is.